Pendulum Swing
by Checkerboards
Summary: What has two sides and flies without wings? The Riddler's about to find out...


_Author's Note: I broke my finger, which makes typing for longer than a few minutes at a time extremely difficult. I'll get back to 'All Together Now' as soon as I can. In the meantime, here's something that I posted on my tumblr a few weeks back. Enjoy!_

Thick, cold raindrops splattered heavily on the rooftops of Gotham City. It thudded onto the skywalks perched across the streets, spanged off of skylights, and did its best to soak Edward Nygma through his triple-layered raincoats.

He yanked at his hood, sending a short shower of gathered raindrops over his hand, and focused on his work. This riddle - well, this _set_ of riddles - was going to be his greatest venture ever. All across the city, on a variety of rooftops, he'd left elaborate deathtraps, massive metal puzzles with all sorts of tricky bits and pieces, and a small selection of cages with human figures posed inside. (Not that they were _real_ people - well, not this time anyway. This time, he'd fashioned fake people out of clues pointing to the next riddle to solve. He had briefly considered leaving live people up there to deliver the clues to Batman verbally, but given that it was mid-February, leaving live people on the rooftops for two weeks meant that they'd rapidly become dead people, and dead people couldn't tell Batman anything. Besides, any benefit from having real people in the cages would be rapidly outweighed by the psychotically vengeful anger that Batman would unleash on him after he found their corpses.) And by the time Batman had sorted through all of his deviously delightful diversions, the Riddler would be safely away with his truckload of newly-stolen art and jewelry from the storage areas of the Gotham Museum.

This particular deathtrap was a beauty. It was a huge sphere made of carefully bent thick-walled pipes supporting sections of heavy-duty chain-link fence. In order to get to the "person" inside it, Batman would have to type in a series of codes derived from carefully marked passages inside a book that he'd tucked into the previous mannequin's jacket. If he typed in the wrong code, if he tried to cut through the chain-link fence, or if he took more than five minutes to solve it, the entire thing would zap to life with four thousand volts of sizzling electricity.

Of course, sizzling electricity and torrential rain did not go well together, which is why Eddie had carefully avoided plugging the thing in. Instead, he focused on getting the dummy into position through the secret door in the back. It was harder than it looked, given that the dummy was made out of a carefully chosen assortment of vegetables stuffed into an oversized men's suit and trench coat. The eggplants kept sliding out of the ankles, the spinach leaves kept fluttering out of the sleeves like gigantic confetti, and the pumpkin head was just _impossible_ to deal with. But eventually, after a lot of swearing, he'd manhandled the dripping-wet thing into place and strapped it to its chair, which was in turn bolted to the frame of the trap.

He clambered out of the trap and moved to the front to examine it. It looked perfect. Once the rain let up, he could hook up the wiring, and then the _real_ fun would begin.

He arched himself backward in a bone-cracking stretch and reveled in the feel of the icy raindrops hitting his neck. It was two-thirty-eight, and he only had two more traps to set before he could go home and get dry. He took another step backward, proudly examining his handiwork and congratulating himself on a job well done.

A monstrous black blur sped out of the pouring rain and slammed into his left shoulder. He and the whatever-it-was tumbled in a splashing, swearing bundle until they collided hard with the small crumbling stone balustrade that fenced off the top of the roof.

Eddie wrenched his head around, prepared to do some very serious threatening of whoever it was, and found himself staring directly into Batman's laser-bright and mildly concussed stare.

With the aid of years of practice, Eddie eeled away from Batman's clutching hands and scrambled to his feet, dodging desperately around his deathtrap and locking himself securely inside it.

The vigilante rose to his feet, ignoring the rain that cascaded from his cape, and stalked to the trap. "Where is he?" he growled.

"Where is who?" Eddie asked, doing his best to look like a criminal mastermind instead of a lightly terrified man crouching behind a man-shaped bundle of vegetation strapped to a chair.

"Two-Face."

"Why on earth would I know?" Eddie said, edging away from a large, splatty dribble of water running through a gap in the trap above him.

"He was seen on this block at 1:30. You know it's the twenty-second, you know that he likes to work at 2:00, and you know where he is. _Don't you_," he suggested in a snarl.

"I haven't seen him for three weeks, and when I _did_ see him, he didn't exactly let me read his dayplanner," Eddie said irritably. "I have no idea what Harvey's up to."

Batman examined him with that cold, grim stare that he'd been on the wrong end of so many times. He could almost tell what the man was thinking - setting a trap on the rooftops with a vegetable man inside just wasn't Harvey's style. No, the only one in town that would be _brilliant_ enough to come up with such a scheme would be the man who had conveniently trapped himself inside his own creation.

Batman strode forward. "No, wait! Don't-" Eddie yelped desperately, but it was too late. Batman had already propelled the sphere forward with a mighty shove.

Eddie scrambled along inside it like a hamster in a ball, albeit a hamster who was being repeatedly smacked in the head with soggy vegetables. He rolled along the rooftop, clawing his way to some kind of stability, and managed to get himself semi-upright just in time to see the balustrade give way under the sudden impact of five hundred pounds of steel and horrified supervillain.

He screeched as he plummeted toward the street. They said that things stopped being as scary when you experienced them more than once, but whoever_ they_ were, they had obviously not been regularly dropped off of buildings. Seeing the far-away street rushing toward you never got any easier.

Something whizzed toward him and looped itself neatly around a protruding section of the trap. Eddie slammed hard into the opposite wall of the sphere as it stopped falling down and began swinging sideways. He was just able to see Batman perched on a skywalk with a length of cord wrapped around it as he pendulumed past. Cars below him honked their horns in panic as his gigantic metal contraption came within an inch of doing some serious damage to their paintwork. And then, with a stomach-churning lift, the sphere rose into the air like a demonic tetherball and pivoted around the skywalk. Frantically, in one weightless moment, Eddie snagged the vegetable man's chair with one arm and threw himself into it, resting his chin on the chair back, straddling the seat, and wrapping all of his limbs around the chair's rungs as if he were a sloth who really, really loved its tree. Tomatoes squished somewhere under his thighs.

The sphere dropped earthward again. Eddie clung to the chair, still screaming, as he was propelled once again in a huge arc around the skywalk. This time, though, as the sphere began to crest the curve, it stopped just short of the tipping point and swung back the other way. Back and forth it swung, back and forth, back and forth, sending Eddie and his vegetables in the same parabolic path as the world rocked dizzyingly beneath him.

Finally, the sphere stopped swinging, or at least it stopped to the extent that it _could _stop while being battered by wind, rain, and the occasional rock from a bystander who really hated the Riddler and his associates.

He clung there, panting, trying to calm himself down. He wasn't dead. He wasn't dead. He was okay. He really was okay. Really. As the adrenaline surge slowly faded away, Eddie's knees began to remind him that hanging upside down was something that was for bats, not supervillains. He slowly uncurled himself from the chair and thudded down to what should have been the top of the deathtrap. Vegetables, free from his pinning embrace, rained down on him in a series of disgustingly squishy thumps.

He peered down through the rain. Below him, lights flashing, a squadron of police cars was waiting. The police stood in the street, weapons aimed at him. "_Come out and keep your hands where we can see them_!" one bellowed through a bullhorn.

Eddie glanced behind him. The secret door had been warped permanently closed somewhere in the hellish journey between the rooftop and his current aerial perch above 4th Avenue.

Well, it would be far too demeaning to admit that he was stuck. "_Come and get me_!" he bellowed tauntingly.

Almost immediately, a cherry-picker filled with a pair of SWAT men armed with rifles, riot shields, and bolt cutters rose into view. "Hands up!" one barked, leveling his weapon directly at Eddie's face.

Eddie obligingly raised his hands, staring slightly cross-eyed at the end of the gun barrel while the other man clipped a Riddler-sized hole in the wire. After a brief and awkward trip through the hole, down to the ground, and out of the cherry-picker, Edward Nygma found himself face-down on the asphalt being roughly handcuffed by no less than seven members of Gotham's finest. When they were certain that they'd cuffed him correctly, they hauled him to his feet and quick-marched him down the street to the flotilla of police vehicles blocking traffic.

Sweaty, exhausted, dripping wet and covered with the remains of a triple armload of vegetables, the Riddler sank gratefully onto the hard wooden bench in the back of the police van. At least Arkham was dry.


End file.
